The present disclosure relates to an image forming apparatus, and particularly to a technique of storing a setting of a job to be executed by the image forming apparatus in an external storage medium, and of obtaining the setting from the external storage medium.
Conventionally, many different jobs are executed by a plurality of users in an image forming apparatus such as a multifunction peripheral with various functions, for example a copy function and a scanning function. As such an image forming apparatus, an apparatus has been known that allows a user to store a setting of a job already executed in an external storage medium such as a USB memory, and to easily execute a job having the same contents by applying the setting thus stored in the external storage medium to the image forming apparatus, when the user operates the image forming apparatus next time.
However, in the conventional image forming apparatus as described above, if a large number of job settings are stored in the external storage medium, the user is required to select a job setting to be applied to the image forming apparatus from a large number of options. Accordingly, it may be difficult for the user to select a desired job setting. In addition, if the external storage medium storing the job settings happens to be acquired by a third party, it may be that the third party easily causes another image forming apparatus to read the job settings. In this manner, it may be that the unauthorized third party executes the job settings by the image forming apparatus.